Well, Taiwan itself is.

But I think because their goal is to decimate trust in democratic institutions, the underlying subtext is always that democracy only leads to chaos, that democracy only leads to people hating each other. So, it’s a kind of meta-answer to your question, because if we can pre-bunk the idea that ...

Well, in the Taiwan case, obviously every time they try to strike the existing tensions within the Taiwanese society, and I think they’re opportunistic in that it’s not one ideology or another ideology, it’s not one party versus another party. If people care about food safety, then it’s food safety. ...

Of course, and I understand that the Puma’s Academy, and you know, IORG, Doublethink, g0v, these people, they’re already trying something like that. Yeah, but probably not coming from exactly the same school, but the idea…

That’s how the international scammers do now. They kidnapped Taiwanese people.

It does sound flattering.

Sure.

Sure. I don’t have anything after this.

It’s really smart. Maybe it will work for another couple years.

Okay.

You can do multiple pseudonyms. It’s just like the Apple private email relay. So, you verify you’re a citizen of Taiwan, but because you don’t reveal anything else, that doesn’t prevent you from creating pseudonyms. And in cases where a Sybil attack and so on need to be prevented, we ...

To your question, it may be possible for me to pretend I’m three people at the moment, because I do have the Palau ID, Lithuania ID, and Taiwan ID, and currently there’s no deduplication, like India’s Aadhaar that does this cross-verification.

No, it’s not. Well, I’m also an e-Lithuanian. And a Palau digital resident. We’re now working on interoperability layers…

Yes. If you are a resident, we also hand out the alien citizen digital certificates, the foreign CDC, which also work with our FidO app.

And for free. Everybody can now download…

Yes.

Through zero-knowledge proofs. If you search for Yivi.app, you can see how exactly.

No, because it’s always anchored to a sovereign backed identity. So, the main thing is to not degenerate into the real name internet that PRC imposes. This is why we are working with the latest zero-knowledge protocols, like translating the Yivi app from Netherlands that lets you prove you’re 18 ...

Exactly.

We currently already do that. If there’s a broad number pretending to be a Taiwan number calling to you, we don’t block that from the NCC level because sometimes it’s actually people roaming… but it’s most likely scam. So now there’s a mandatory voice that says “it’s probably scam,” do ...

Yes. Basically when all the trusted, not just officials, but also private sector players and so on in Taiwan switched to those short numbers, like 111 or three code, four code, and so on, the legacy 10 code, the full mobile number, if it’s not in your contact list, maybe ...

Yeah, XPOC.

Yeah, to adopt provenance frameworks.

And the main obstacle for this is how do we recognize digital signatures across jurisdictions? So, this is something like the European wallet, European blockchain is doing, the trust systems are doing, and we’re now adjusting our Digital Signature Act and the Cybersecurity Measurement Act to do cross-border signature verification. ...

And the same goes for provenance of online, like blue ticks. So, if I have a single manifest of all my blue ticks or not social media accounts, everything else that purports to be Audrey Tang from Taiwan’s digital ministry is fake. So, instead of playing whack-a-mole and saying that ...

For example, if everybody can see only the SMS coming from 111 is official, any content or distribution that says that it’s exactly the same as an official website, official communication, even carry on an extended conversation, like an official doesn’t work anymore because there is one well-known number that ...

Yeah, so I think, first of all, in terms of Actor Behavior Content Distribution, ABCD, “disinformation” is at the content layer, with harms caused by distribution. But we’ve entirely shifted left. We now just talk about foreign interference. Foreign is actor, interference is behavior — content and distribution are outside ...

No, I’ve been thinking about this non-stop.

Sure. So, in addition to…

Well, it was before Elon Musk…

Yeah, so maybe community notes as an idea, not as the X.com codebase. This is something we should work on together.

And so, without crowdsourced contextualization, it’s just a handful of people in the International Fact-Checking Network, the Poynter network, doing this this, and they are about to be overwhelmed. So, I expect platforms like Meta to adopt some sort of community notes in the future.

Exactly. Exactly, and that’s actually the only way to scale now that, before language models, only local Taiwanese people speaking a whole lot, like Taigi, can make scam phone calls to scam people speaking Taigi. But now, with language models, anyone around the world can do the same now because ...

Because they understand how the voting works.

Yeah, it’s not language modeling. And what we call Polis 2.0, which is language modeling and evaluation works on top of this simple base and does two things: Synthesize a summary, including a synthetic avatar; and second, to steer conversation toward bridge-making statements the way your API does.

It is AI, it’s just not deep learning. It’s just normal k-means clustering and stuff.

Yeah, so it’s exactly the same as community notes, because community notes took the Polis paper and implemented it.

So, as you can see, this group, this just started, so not a lot of people. 10 people actually occupy a higher area than 37 people. This is dimensional reduction, right? And so, if these people mobilize and vote exactly the same, the number may increase, but the area does ...

But because Polis measures what we call group-informed consensus, which means if you have two groups, and one… let me just show you the Polis conversation. It’s easier that way. We’re actually having a Polis conversation right now around public money, public code.

It’s a marketing email. So, it’s open to everybody, but yeah. It’s open to everybody, it’s self-selection. So, it’s actually local Taiwanese. It’s not a foreign interference, but it’s an interference by a stakeholder saying to everyone.

Right, exactly. Yeah, it’s a sortition, right? A random selection. So, in both self-selections, but guarded by SMS and FidO, or sortition, which is based on a known customer list for statistical representativeness, these two are quite robust. In the Airbnb conversation, what happened was that Airbnb sent an email ...

In the Ideathon which I just showed you, you have to either have a local SMS number, or you can use FidO if you’re abroad, and you’re enrolling, for example. In a week or so, we will send the government SMS, starting from our ministry and six other ministries, from ...

Exactly.

That’s right, that’s right. So, that’s grassroots, that’s not my ministry.

Oh, you did?

Exactly. And the original vTaiwan community, which is not sponsored by the government in any way, recently just partnered with the Turing Institute at Chatham House. And they together formed this interesting democratic alliance that also worked with OpenAI, which is distinct from the Alignment Assemblies that I just mentioned.

Not really.

Exactly. Start such a conversation.